Reflection 10 - What D.I. Means to Me

The quote that I selected to write about is "Students will learn best when they can make a connection between the curriculum and their interests and life experiences." I have to believe that any teacher would create projects and come up with interesting and fun ways to connect the curriculum with their students' interests and life experiences every time if they could. However, it isn't realistic for each teacher to create that type of curriculum every time they try to. I may not be thinking outside the box, but isn't it impossible for a math or science teacher to relate their subject material with their students' interests and life experiences? I can definitely see how an English teacher or Social Studies teacher could create some projects and curriculum that would relate to their students' interests and life experiences. But it just doesn't seem realistic to be able to achieve this type of relation of curriculum in every subject or in every assignment. As a future teacher of special education students, I know that half of the battle will be to keep my students interested and motivated in my class. Differentiating the instruction and making it interesting and relative to them will help win that battle. But what does differentiated instruction mean to me? I feel that differentiating instruction is something you can do when you are in the correct situations. I don't feel it is something that can be forced. Hopefully, I will be teaching classes where it is easier to mix up my curriculum. However, I know that I can't rely on that because I will be teaching different classes each year as an intervention specialist. How is Differentiated Instruction aligned with standards based curriculum? I'm not exactly sure how it is but I know that teachers can differentiate their lessons and they can still relate to the standardized tests that their students will be taking. If it was impossible to align differentiated instruction with standards-based curriculum than we wouldn't be discussing differentiated instruction at all. Carol Ann Tomlinson says that recent demands for more standards-based teaching can feel like a huge impediment to encouraging differentiated instruction, especially for teachers and principals who recognize student variance and want to address it appropriately. A relatively new phenomenon (at least in its current form), standards-based instruction dominates the educational terrain in a time of great academic diversity in contemporary classrooms. In fact, standards-based instruction and the high-stakes testing that drives it can often feel like a locomotive rolling over everything in its path, including individualized learning. When any phenomenon in education suggests that we may have to jettison common sense and good pedagogy, we must first examine it in light of what we know about high-quality instruction. In other words, if we understand how standards-based teaching does or does not align with sound teaching and learning practices, we can then approach what look like barriers to differentiation. In truth, the conflict between focusing on standards and focusing on individual learners' needs exists only if we use standards in ways that cause us to abandon what we know about effective curriculum and instruction. I agree with Carol Ann Tomlinson. It just seems that teachers can become so frustrated because it is as though the teaching is being taken away from them and all they have left to do is to recite and repeat. Repetition, Repetition, Repetition, as though teachers are now robots! Differentiated instruction is supposed to give the teaching back to the teachers. I know that good administrators and school districts will allow their teachers to teach, although they are handicapped too because they want to show success through the standardized test scores, but in the end, good school districts and good administrators will support teachers teaching!